Google crashes, internet traffic halved

Falls by 40 percent in minutes

More than 40 percent of the world’s internet traffic disappeared after Google suffered a spectacular outage on Friday.

The outage only lasted from one to five minutes, depending on where you were, but all of the services from Google Search to Gmail to YouTube to Google Drive went down.

Google has not said why the outage happened, but according to web analytics firm GoSquared, global internet traffic fell by around 40 percent during the black-out.

According to Sky News, this figure reflects Google's iron fist control of the internet.

GoSquared developer Simon Tabor said that it was clear that for many users, the reliance on Google is huge.

Seconds after the outage, page views spiked shortly afterwards as users managed to get to their destination.

A message on the Google Apps Dashboard showed all of its services were hit.

"We're aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a significant subset of users. The affected users are able to access Gmail, but are seeing error messages and/or other unexpected behaviour," it said.

What is interesting is that Google itself only thinks that 50 to 70 percent of requests to Google received errors. This means that if the outage had really been total the figure could have been much worse.

Google has a vested interest in never letting that happen again. In the four minutes it was down it would have lost $500,000 in lost advertising.

To have a problem that size there would have had to have been a physical infrastructure problem. Google is saying nothing, so we can probably make up an excuse and no one will deny it. We are pumping for alien invasion, defeated by the common cold minutes after the final waves landed.